2013

November 3, 2013

by Walter Chaw Two scenes: one
featuring a bonfire-illuminated kiss against a forest backdrop, the other a
man standing on a platform in a clearing as a crowd fills in around him. Both
are captured in glorious 16mm, shot through with grain and lit by natural
light; both are suffused with a magical, twilit glow that only really happens
in exactly this way when you use old, some would say obsolete, technology.
These moments almost, by themselves, justify the existence Alexander Mirecki's All
Together Now. At the least, there's nothing about the substance of the film
that detracts from the beauty of Zoran Popovic's cinematography. Plotless,
listless maybe, wobbling slightly from portentous to unassuming and slight, the
picture is a half-fictionalized document of an all-night music festival that,
in the tradition of Richard Linklater's earliest forays into proto-mumblecore
(Harmony Korine's, too), doesn't have much on its mind and would even,
given its lo-fi visual beauty, be better served as a silent.
Still, it demonstrates just enough in terms of instinct to suggest that Mirecki
has a future. Lou Taylor Pucci presents an affable semi-centre for the piece as
the organizer of the concert and recipient of the aforementioned kiss, while
bands like Manicorn, Pedestrian Deposit, Nice Face, and Night
Control provide the right CBGB authenticity when we pull away from the
overly-scripted (overly-slotted, truth be told) interactions of the audience.

by
Jefferson Robbins Charles B. Pierce's
1976 thriller The Town That Dreaded Sundown makes
a fetish of breath.
The bag-headed killer, ripped from the headlines of 1946 Texarkana, is
a
mouth-breather, his mask working like a bellows whether he's exerting
himself
or not. He's announced by his respiring, as when rural housewife Helen
Reed (Dawn
Wells) ceases brushing her rich black hair to listen for him outside
her home.
And his most artful, or perhaps comical, kill is executed with a
bayonet
trombone, stabbing with each exhalation. He's the old stereotype of the
heavy-breathing phone pervert writ deadly, shambling up to parked
teenagers and
taking his jollies as he may. Sexual assault is implicit in his
approach but
quickly disavowed, although he heavily bites his earliest female
victim. An
oral compulsion that is sexual but not; a murder that is penetrative
rape but
not... As scripted, the never-captured Phantom Killer of Texarkana
would be a
pretty interesting psychological study.

by
Walter Chaw Based on a true story in the same way that
a pineapple is an apple, James Wan's latest exercise in jump-scare
theatre is
the workmanlike haunted house/demonic possession flick The
Conjuring. In
it, the paranormal investigation team of Ed (Patrick Wilson) and
Lorraine (Vera
Farmiga) Warren, co-authors of several books and shown as the film
begins
lecturing a small auditorium of people on the finer points of
ghost-hunting,
confront their Greatest Challenge Ever when they're called to the
modest New
England farmhouse of the Perron family. It seems this was the former
home of a WITCH! Can you fucking believe the luck? An evil witch lived
in this
house. Fuck. A witch. Motherfucker, am I right? You buy a house and you
think
that...anyway, it really sucks that a witch lived there. It all starts
out
innocently enough with the largely-indistinguishable Perron girls
getting
jerked out of bed by an invisible whatever, then evolves into a game of
hide
and clap (which sounds venereal but isn't, unless you're doing it
really wrong)
that leads to mommy Carolyn (Lili Taylor) getting thrown down a flight
of
stairs into a creepy, boarded-up cellar™. That's when daddy Roger (Ron
Livingston) calls the Warrens... Well, he doesn't,
because he's away on a
week-long business trip and he's a skeptic of the Warrens, we learn
after the
fact... Um... He's not a well-developed character, seeing as how Wan
seems
distracted by all the loud noises and crap leaping out at the camera.

by Walter Chaw Ernst
Lubitsch took
chances, none greater than To Be or Not to Be. Released
in the first
months of America's involvement in WWII, in that initial flurry of
propaganda
that saw the Nazis as murderous, animalistic, inhuman Hun, Lubitsch
chose
instead to portray them as ridiculous, as human--to make a comedy, a
farce...and
a masterpiece, as it happens. It's a crystallization of his work in
that way:
He's always more interested in foible than in oppressive arcs of
personal failure--if
Nazis can be seen to be possessed of the same faults as the rest of us,
the
same vanities, the same fears. Make no mistake, To Be or Not
to Be is no
olive branch. Seventy years on, it remains among the most withering
satires of
totalitarian governments and the politics of groupthink, but it
suggests that
Nazism is just one of many insufficient sops to the insecurities
hardwired into us--that we're all just thin projections strutting and fretting
our hour
on the proverbial stage, each susceptible to things that would give relief from the pain of lack of self-confidence and identity. It's a
film that
seeks to explain why people create cults of personality. That it sets
itself
amongst a theatre troupe performing "Hamlet", itself a play that houses
another play within itself (holding a mirror up to nature, indeed),
makes total
sense in a picture that, through this absurdity, seeks to highlight
greater
absurdities. Of all his great films (and when push comes to shove, I'd
say Trouble
in Paradise is and likely always will be my favourite
Lubitsch), To Be or
Not to Be is inarguably his greatest.

by Bill Chambers SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. For a fool's errand, Psycho II--a decades-belated, colour follow-up to a seminal black-and-white horror by a filmmaker whose mythical stature had only grown since his death--is nothing short of a miracle. The story goes that in the early-Eighties, when sequels were the new Gold Rush, Universal--who'd seen healthy returns on Jaws 2 and Smokey and the Bandit II--realized it had a sequelizable property in Psycho but intended to hedge their bets with a telefilm for the burgeoning cable market. When Anthony Perkins got wind of the project, he expressed an unanticipated interest in reprising the role of Norman Bates, having done so one time before in a warmly-received sketch on the first season of "Saturday Night Live". Australian Richard Franklin, a USC graduate back in Hollywood to direct the picture, realized the studio could be shamed into releasing Psycho II theatrically were Perkins to star in it, and recruited The Beast Within screenwriter Tom Holland (who went on to give us Fright Night and Child's Play) to craft a script the actor couldn't resist. Once Perkins said "yes," Universal begrudgingly bumped it up to a feature but still expected it to be made quickly and cheaply like the original--probably to the perverse delight of Hitchcock scholar Franklin, who prided himself on doing things the Master's way all through production, going so far as to cameo in the film.

October 23, 2013

by Walter Chaw When I read The Crossing, I believed
it to be the finest American novel in the Southern Gothic tradition since
Faulkner rolled up Yoknapatawpha County under his arm and went home. Then I
read Blood Meridian, and thought I was in the presence of maybe the most
important American author since, who, Pynchon? But after that, Cormac McCarthy dried
up. I didn't care for Cities on the Plain, his wrapping up of the lauded
"Border Trilogy" that began with All the Pretty Horses and
sandwiched The Crossing in between, and I thought No Country For Old
Men was weak and obvious, lacking fire, while The Road was well and
completely flaccid. Going backwards didn't help: Child of God was a
fragment, Suttree had that bit with the pig but not much else, and the
incest fairytale Outer Dark seemed a sketch. But then the Coens adapted No
Country for Old Men as a summary critique of the key themes of McCarthy's
work, and I was entranced again, or at least willing to give his stuff a shot
again. It's the mark of a gifted critic, and the Coens are our most gifted
literary critics, to reanimate something that's been dead for a while. So we
land here, following a too-faithful screen translation of The Road and the curious, forgettable, elderly HBO flick The Sunset Limited (first written by McCarthy as a play) with
the inevitability of a film, The Counselor, based on an original
screenplay by McCarthy, supervised by McCarthy to the point of McCarthy giving
line readings to frickin' Michael Fassbender, and promoted with McCarthy billed
almost as prominently in the breathless trailer as director Ridley Scott and
co-star Brad Pitt. And, yes, this film by a novelist twenty years
past his prime, dabbling now in a new medium like old Michael Jordan playing
baseball, stinks of an almost Greek hubris, an almost Icarean overreaching. The
Counselor is uniquely awful.

by
Bryant Frazer The first of two low-budget films that John
Carpenter wrote pseudonymously and directed in and around downtown Los
Angeles
in the late-1980s, John Carpenter's Prince of Darkness
is one of the
creepiest movies ever made. Underrated at the time by critics who
called it
"cheesy" (Vincent Canby)1 and said
"[it] stinks"
(Richard Harrington), Prince of Darkness was
clearly made fast and on
the cheap, and it's roughly-crafted by Carpenter standards. Still, it's a
triumph
of mood. Filling out a mystery-of-the-ancient-artifact yarn with a
cosmic-horror
mythology, Prince of Darkness lives in a sweet
spot between religious
thriller and Satanic potboiler where science is the way, the truth, and
the
life, for better or worse.

October 22, 2013

by Jefferson Robbins Back in September, I published the Kindle ebook The Curse of Frankenstein: A Dissection--a scene-by-scene analytical love letter to a film that shaped me, and discloses hidden depths the more one looks at it.

October 20, 2013

Next Exit **/**** (UK, 14 mins., d. Benjamin Goodger) A light
bit of nothing, Next Exit is a little Ludditism along the lines of that
one episode of the American "The Office" where Michael Scott follows
the bad instructions of his GPS directly into a lake. The performances are
good, the direction is fairly pedestrian, and the story, about a girl who
accepts a ride home from a pub one night, has a couple of decent twists but is
ultimately more mildly clever than disturbing or compelling. In its short time,
it does manage to cover the bases in terms of going out of cell-phone range and
the suggestion of a cyclical ending, but it fails mostly in terms of generating much in the way of horror or comedy. Mostly, I had trouble
with the idea that anyone would think a hotel--or a hospital, or
anything--is located in the middle of the woods.

October 18, 2013

by Angelo Muredda The blood doesn't flow so much as it
spurts in A Touch
of Sin, Jia Zhangke's invigorated if uneven
return to straight fiction following an extended sojourn in hybridized
documentaries about modern Chinese cities. More than the formal homecoming,
however, it's the nature of the storytelling that surprises in his newest--the
leap from the elegiac tone of films like 24 City
into the more primal stuff of pulp. A wuxia
anthology with revenge-thriller overtones, A Touch of Sin is an unusually direct genre exercise for a master
filmmaker, in the sense that, unlike Steven Spielberg's Munich and other comparably shame-faced prestige films that
dip a single toe in the waters of genre, it doesn't condescend to the populist
trappings of the material. Jia isn't slumming so much as tapping into the
righteous indignation of a popular tradition of stories about wronged knights
and ruined innocents, sincerely transposed here to the working-class fringe of
a nation state in the throes of late capitalism. If Jia's violence comes fast
and leaves a mess, then, it's a testament to his willingness to get his hands
dirty where others might have kept a safer distance.

October 17, 2013

by Walter Chaw And so I find myself again reviewing a documentary that's terribly informative but not terribly artistic, Greg
Camalier's Muscle Shoals, which does a very fine job of cataloguing all the
great musicians who discovered their "sound," their "funk,"
their swamp, if you will, along the banks of the Tennessee River in a little
Alabama town called "Muscle Shoals." Aretha Franklin, Paul Simon,
Jimmy Cliff, Wilson Pickett, Percy Sledge, Traffic--and, oh, there's
Bono, talking about the struggle of black people, why not. Camalier throws a lot of stuff
out there but can't quite find the balance between artsy pretension and
straight reportage. Every time he mentions someone calling someone else, in other
words, he's somehow dug up a different portrait of someone on a telephone--let
it marinate enough, repeat it enough, and suddenly it's unintentionally
hilarious. Bono could be connected to the film because either U2 was
greatly influenced by the Shoals variety of R&B or because Bono is an
expert talking-head or because Bono is an insufferable boor who likes to be on
camera. Whatever the case, archival footage--always fun, if not that much funner
than a night spent chain-surfing YouTube--splits time with new interviews with
dudes like Keith Richards who wax rhapsodic about the magic of the place. It
doesn't go pear-shaped, though, until Native Americans are invoked, revealing
that the original name of the Tennessee River had something to do with singing.

by Walter Chaw If you were to boil down Brian DePalma's
work, at least his earlier work, into a few ideas, you'd land on the way he took
Hitchcock's subterranean perversions and made them perversion perversions,
transforming pieces and suggestions into themes and declarations. Looking at DePalma's Carrie today, what's
there is a clear attempt--often successful--to elevate B-movie tropes to the status high art, or high pulp: What Godard did to gangster films, DePalma did to Hitchcock, turning the
already formal into formalism. When DePalma was at his best, his movies
evoked in daylight what Hitchcock inspired in shadow. Of its many technical innovations, his Carrie, an
adaptation of Stephen King's not-very-good but vibe-y debut novel, was aided immeasurably by pitch-perfect casting: Sissy
Spacek, P.J. Soles, John Travolta, Amy Irving, and Nancy Allen. Hip then, it's hip
still--and sexy as hell, as befitting a story that's ultimately about a girl's
sexual awakening and, let's face it, really bangin' first orgasm. On prom
night, no less. What could be more American?

October 16, 2013

by Walter Chaw David (Rhys Wakefield) screws up and loses
girlfriend Jill (Ashley Hinshaw), only to run into her the night of a gigantic,
hedonistic, Gatsby-esque party attended by rave strippers, DJs, and drug
dealers. An unlikely place to stage a comeback, David, with buddy Teddy (Logan
Miller), coaxes Jill into a conversation that goes south--but then the
lights cut out, there's a weird meteorite event outside, and David finds
himself with the opportunity to try the conversation again: same place, different
Jill. It seems that something's created a quantum split--a little bleed-over
maybe from a parallel dimension that twists time and creates doubles of all the
revellers, though only a few notice. The ones who don't party on in a kind of
nightmarish inattention that reminds of the dreamscapes of Miracle
Mile and After Hours; the ones who do begin to wonder what will
happen when the time-slips overlap and they find themselves attempting to share
the same space as their doppelgängers.

by Jefferson
Robbins Before it became a lazily-applied shorthand
for my generation in particular, Slacker was a
film about doom. It's
pervasive throughout this seemingly casual, meticulously-constructed,
24-hour
baton-pass through bohemian Austin, Texas, in which characters confront
intimations of death, their own or that of the species in general, and
respond
with rhetoric, bemusement, a fatalistic shrug, or a joyride. Writer-director Richard Linklater awakens from vivid dreams on a bus in the opening
scene, then unspools
his vision
to a Buddha-silent cabdriver (Rudy Basquez). His most memorable dreams,
he
reports, often feature sudden death: "There's always someone gettin'
run
over or something really weird." Fair enough to wonder if we're not
dreaming along with him, in some dress rehearsal for Waking
Life, when
he quickly happens upon a mother (Jean Caffeine) sprawled in a
residential
Austin boulevard, freshly driven over by her disturbed son (Mark
James).

by
Walter Chaw Doomed to be compared--unfavorably, I
think--to Harmony Korine's Spring Breakers, Sofia
Coppola's The Bling
Ring is better seen as another document of ennui and
privilege and the
different ways the same old dissatisfaction and yearning manifest in
endlessly
evolving, endlessly confounding ways, generation by generation.
Appearing as
they both do in the middle of a ceaseless recession with our leaders
arguing,
as they did in the late-1930s, about social programs that one side
believed
indispensable and the other recklessly overpriced, neither film is
terribly
different in structure and execution from The Wizard of Oz.
Coppola,
upon reflection, is the perfect artist for an updating of Dorothy's
trip to the
Emerald City--she is, after all, Dorothy. If you were to freeze-frame
the film
during its opening titles (scored brilliantly, discordantly, by the Sleigh
Bells' "Crown on the Ground"), you'd note, as my editor
Bill did on Twitter,
that Coppola's own credit reads "Written and Directed by Rich Bitch
Sofia
Coppola." Self-awareness, self-deprecation, it's all of those things,
but
what it is most, I think, is a kind of acceptance: her own peace with
her
relationship with the two "acts" of her public life, the first
indicated perhaps by her father not protecting her well enough as an
actress,
the second by her move to behind the camera as a director of quiet,
trance-like pictures about little girls
lost. If The Bling Ring is ultimately the least
of Coppola's films, it
gathers weight, develops context, taken as a whole with the others. Say
what
you will and count me deep in her camp, Coppola is every bit the auteur
her
father is--and it's his fault.